Ocean Falls Museum - Personal Recollections

INTRODUCTORY REMARK
THE PICTURES
THE MILL
THE PEOPLE
MOUNTAINS
JOBS

CUTTING GRASS
TELEPHONE OPERATOR
MESSENGER BOY
OFFICE HELP
ICE MAN
CLERK IN THE GROCERY STORE
LONGSHORING
TALLYMAN
SCALER
CHAINMAN
SANDING FLOORS
CARPENTER'S HELPER
LAND CLEARING
BROKE BEATER OPERATOR
PAPER TESTER & PAPER INSPECTOR
MISCELLANEOUS JOBS
ASSISTANT TO A STONE MASON
WORKIN' ON THE BOOM

EMORY LEWIS
A FEW MEMORABLE EVENTS

2200 VOLTS
YANKEE DRYER
PENSTOCK
SHIVAREES

Epilogue

 

INTRODUCTORY REMARK

This is the story of a prosperous town in British Columbia where no one owned a car or a TV set and where all the roads were made of wood.

The task I am undertaking is not an easy one for me.  Although I am something of a diarist, no one could call me a writer and apart from some technical articles I have never attempted to write anything of any length before.

But I find that as I grow older, memories of my days in Ocean Falls come frequently to mind and I realize what an unusual town it was and I feel a strange compulsion to try my hand at describing what the town and its people were like when I lived there from 1924 until about 1940.

This will certainly be no scholarly, exhaustively researched history of Ocean Falls.  It is nothing more than the personal recollections of one person who feels a deep sense of gratitude to the circumstances that led him to spend what may be called his formative years in this unique town.  Of course it is a biased account of the town because it is a view seen only through the eyes of a very young person.

THE PICTURES

Following are two pictures of Ocean Falls which should make it easier to follow my descriptions of the town.  They are the best I could find but unfortunately they were taken many years after I had left Ocean Falls and in several respects they show a town somewhat different from that which I knew in the 1930’s.  The hotel is new; there are two or three extra apartment buildings, and the Jap Town of which I speak has been burned down and replaced by some duplexes.

However, the view from the top of Sawmill Mountain serves to show the general layout very nicely with Link Lake in the background and just a bottom bit of Baldy Mountain at the extreme upper right.  I can even show you the house in which we lived.  Just in from the left side of the picture you will see a large, long apartment with a black roof.  The second house to the right of the apartment is House 626, Patterson residence from 1924 to about 1945.

The closer up picture features the big new hotel which I never knew but to the right of it in the picture is the same old store.  Left center is the hospital.  To the right of the hospital and just in front of the hotel is the townsite office and at the bottom of the picture is the townsite wharf where all the passenger boats docked.   

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THE TOWN

Perhaps the best introduction to Ocean Falls will be to tell you how to get there or, at least, to tell you what the journey to Ocean Falls was like back in the late 20’s and in the 30’s.  In those days there was no air service and, of course, there has never been a road in from anywhere else in B.C.  And so one went in and out of Ocean Falls by boat and the thriving little town was indeed well served in this respect by three coastal steamship lines - The Grand Trunk Pacific (which later became Canadian National Steamships), Canadian Pacific, and Union Steamships.  Each of these had its own character: Canadian National ships were the biggest and fastest and made very few stops on the way up the coast from Vancouver to Prince Rupert.  They were somehow more formal, more impersonal, perhaps more business oriented than the other two.  For many years CN had two ships on this run; the Prince George and the Prince Rupert.  They were sister ships and the only difference I was ever able to detect was that the Prince Rupert had an open railing around the bow while the Prince George had a solid metal combing.

Canadian Pacific Steamships had a large fleet on the coast in those days and, at various times, Ocean Falls was served by the Princess Beatrice, the Maquinna, The Princess Adelaide and the Princess Mary.  Between Ocean Falls and Vancouver these ships typically stopped at Namu, Port McNeil, Alert Bay and Campbell River.  Today we see restaurants advertised as ‘family restaurants’.  One could say that the CP boats were the ‘family’ type of transportation - very friendly and, I think, the favorite of most of the Ocean Falls people.

Union Steamships also had quite a large fleet of which Ocean Falls used to see the Cattala, Cardena and Camosun at various times.  Union Steamships were the very life blood of the small communities along the B.C. coast.  They stopped at logging camps, canneries and almost anywhere where a few crates of groceries or a passenger or two needed to be delivered.

In general character they were a bit rougher and readier than the other two lines.  A Union Steamship leaving Vancouver for the northern outposts was likely to have a compliment of loggers in their work clothes and often rather the worse for wear after a riotous couple of weeks spending their money in the big city.

Normal service to Ocean Falls was once a week for each of the three companies.

There was, of course, considerable rivalry among the three companies but, as far as the boat crews were concerned, this was all in good spirits.  One small anecdote to illustrate the company pride and rivalry:  Capt. Andy Johnson of the Union was justly famous for his ability to handle his ship and, of course, he needed it to get in and out of some of the small camps.  One evening, Capt. Johnson arrived in Ocean Falls to find the CP boat occupying the townsite wharf and so he had to wait his turn.  Just as soon as the CP boat left the dock, Andy was in, got a bow line on the wharf, unloaded his small cargo in a sling and was off again in very short order.  Both the CP & the Union were headed north and both had to make their next stop at Bella Bella where, once again, there was only room for one boat at a time.  There is a short cut to Bella Bella through Gunboat Passage but this route is extremely tortuous, narrow and generally used only by fish boats and pleasure craft.  Under cover of darkness, Andy Johnson rushed through Gunboat (I seriously wonder if his ship insurance was valid for this part of the voyage) and was tied up unloading at Bella Bella when the CP boat arrived!

In recent years, ‘cruises’ have become very popular and from May to the end of September one, two or three big ships leave Vancouver almost every day for the trip up to Alaska.  These ships range in size from about 600 to more than 2000 passenger capacity.  They have swimming pools, snack bars, gambling casinos, all kinds of sports activities, Hollywood type shows, bar service, and souvenir shops.  Our family made this trip last year on a Princess Cruise.  We all enjoyed ourselves but if I still had the choice between one of these great liners and the old CPS Princess Adelaide I would take the latter without hesitation.  On those old time ships the food was as good or better than it is on the big cruise ships of today, the scenery was just the same and the trip was much more restful.

Once, when my family had booked passage to Vancouver on the CP boat, we were advised that the regular CP ship would be replaced for that run by the Princess Kathleen and that our reservations had been transferred to this much larger and more elegant vessel.  We found that some U.S. convention group had arranged a trip to Alaska on the Kathleen and we were to be picked up on the return trip.  One of the passengers on that trip was the U.S. composer, Charles Wakefield Cadman and on the way to Vancouver an afternoon concert was arranged at which Cadman, who was very well known for his interest in the music and folklore of the US Indians, played two of his most famous pieces, ‘From the Land of the Sky-Blue Water’ and ‘At Dawning’ on an Indian flute.

For the trip to Ocean Falls, one boarded the CP ship in the evening at the old Pier D at the foot of Granville Street in Vancouver - up the long gang plank and then down to the Purser’s Office to be assigned a cabin and get the key.  It was always of interest to find out just which cabin one would be assigned although there was little or no difference from one to another.  Then back up on deck or to the observation lounge to watch the ship pull out and see the lights of Vancouver gradually disappear as the ship moved north.

At about 10 p.m. one could go down to the dining room for a late snack - cold cuts, fruits, pastries, cheese and crackers and other goodies were all laid out and white-coated stewards were on hand to pour your tea or coffee.

Sometime during the night or very early morning the first stop was made at Campbell River but by breakfast time Seymour Narrows had been safely passed.  Later in the morning stops were made at Port McNeil and at Alert Bay.  Sometimes the Alert Bay stop was long enough to allow a walk ashore where one could go as far as the Indian cemetery and admire the fine totem poles.

I was always a poor sailor and it was of paramount importance to me on these trips north to find out whether we would reach the Queen Charlotte Sound before or during the lunch period.  The one disadvantage of those old ships was that they were so very much smaller than the big cruise ships of today and so pitched and rolled and corkscrewed in the big swells from the open Pacific Ocean during the four hours it took to get from the shelter of the northern tip of Vancouver Island to the shelter of Calvert Island.  My only solution was to lie in my berth in the cabin and hope for the best.  If one missed lunch there was always afternoon tea with cakes and sandwiches and along about the time when the ship  pulled in to the cannery at Namu one of the stewards went along the cabin corridors and played a little tune on a sort of a hand-held xylophone as an announcement that ‘dinner is now being served’.

The dining room was resplendent in white linen cloths and napkins and all agleam with polished silver.  At each place setting the cutlery stretched out most impressively on either side with at least four knives, four forks and four spoons.  The menus always provided a wide choice and the food and service were excellent.

When the ship stopped rolling it meant that the Queen Charlotte Sound was safely passed and that Namu at the northern end of Fitzhugh Sound would soon be reached.  The stop at Namu was always very brief - just time enough to let the odd passenger ashore and unload a bit of freight.  There was always a group of cannery workers, mostly Indians, on the deck to watch the ship come in.

At the northern end of the Fitzhugh Channel the channel splits into Fisher Channel leading north and Burke Channel veering off to the east with the great bulk of King Island between them.  At its northern end Fisher Channel also splits into Dean Channel leading off eastwards towards Bella Coola and Cousins Inlet extending northward for about another 7 miles and ending at Ocean Falls.

Many of the channels and islands in this area were named by that meticulous explorer of the B.C. coast, Captain Vancouver, back about 1790-95.  It is interesting to note that many of these names had a religious flavour to them.  Fisher Channel was named after Vancouver’s friend, the Reverend John Fisher, who became bishop of Salisbury.  A most prominent mountain on the western end of King Island is called Salisbury Cone.  King Island itself is named after Captain James King with whom Vancouver had served in the Royal Navy but Dean Channel commemorates Capt. King’s father who was the Reverend James King, Dean of Raphoe, Ireland.  Almost at the foot of Salisbury Cone on King Island there is a pretty cove or bay called Port John near the mouth of which are Matthew and Luke Islands and Mark Rocks!

But let us push on past Namu and up Fisher.  Ahead on our right is the landmark of Salisbury Cone.  Off to the left is Lama Passage leading west between Hunter and …er mill that gave the town its existence always came as a surprise to the first-time visitor because Cousins Inlet made an almost 90° turn for the last mile of its length.  This means that to all appearances one is sailing into a dead end at the foot of the big Caro Marion mountain until a sudden turn reveals the town and mill at close range.  The surprise is accented by the fact that the relatively large and very neat townsite and the huge mill are so unlike anything else along the coast.  To arrive in the dark of a winter evening was equally impressive as both the town and the mill were a blaze of lights.

Here is the scene that meets the eye as the ship rounds that last corner and enters the Ocean Falls bay - a bay about a mile long and half a mile wide.  To the left, or North, the bulk of Caro Marion mountain looms its 4000 ft. height, treed to about the 3000 ft. level and then bare rock or scrubby stunted alpine growth.  On the south side of the bay the more gentle ridge of Sawmill mountain, at about 3000 feet, is almost completely clothed with dark forest.  At the head of the bay but back about a mile, the broad, rounded 3800 ft. granite dome of Mount Baldy smiles down on the lake and town at its foot.

Along the shoreline, on either side of the inlet for the best part of a mile, log booms are tied up in long rows waiting to satisfy the insatiable thirst of the pulp and paper mill for wood fiber.

On the lower slopes of Caro Marion the neat white houses and apartments of the town climb up from Front Street to 10th Street high on the hillside.  At the end of the bay and across from the town the grey concrete buildings of the mill with its towers and great tall chimney sprawl over the only flat piece of ground in sight.

Now we are well into the bay; the ship’s whistle blares out and echoes off the mountain slopes.  The throb of the engine dies and we slowly ease in to the wooden wharf.  The heaving lines are thrown and the main landing lines secured.  The gang plank is put in place and we are ready to go ashore.  Welcome to Ocean Falls!

It must be explained at the outset that the Ocean Falls of that era was a company town where everything except the post office and a sort of court house were owned by the Crown Willamette Paper Co. which later became Crown Zellerbach.  For some reason company towns seem to have a bad name.  One recalls the popular song of some years back that says, “St. Peter don’t you call me ‘cause I can’t go.  I owes ma soul to the company store.”  Ocean Falls was most surely an exception to this idea; it was an example of paternalism at its best.  Wages were good, rents were exceptionally low, prices in the company store were most reasonable (and most probably subsidized); the town and its buildings were neat and well kept and many types of sports facilities and entertainment were provided either free or at minimum cost.  Even during the depression days of the “dirty thirties” those young people of Ocean Falls who were attending university could always come home in the summer and be taken on by the company to earn enough to see them through another year.

But now let’s have a walk around town.  The first thing that a visitor would notice was that all the roads in the town were made of wood - no cement, no asphalt, no gravel - just wood.  Originally most of these roads were made of about 3” x 12” planks laid on heavy wooden sleepers.  Many of these were later replaced by 2” x 4” lumber laid on edge and diagonal to the direction of travel.  They made a very fine road.  Not only were the roads of wood but so were all the townsite buildings, even the larger ones such as the company store and the hotel.  Wood was cheap and a big sawmill comprised a part of the mill.

Front Street terminated at the townsite wharf with the company store on one side of the street and the hotel on the other.  Both were about four stories high.

The lower floor of the store was a sort of service and shipping area - free delivery to anywhere in town by company truck.  In this same area there were also an ice making plant and the milk factory where so-called reconstituted milk was made from powdered milk and bottled for door to door delivery.

The Main floor had a tobacco counter, a soda fountain and candy store, a drug counter, a hardware area, a fruit and vegetable section, several grocery counters with clerks in white coats behind each, a meat department, a bread and pastry counter and, at the back of this floor, a little self-contained store where the storekeeper was Japanese and so were all his goods.  Many Japanese worked in the mill and this little store provided them with a taste of home.  Parenthetically, as a boy I discovered that my five or ten cents would buy more candy in the Japanese store than at the regular candy counter and I became quite addicted to the sweet rice cakes and I rather think that the kindly Japanese storekeeper gave extra good measure to young customers.

On the next floor up in the store were the ladies’ wear, men’s wear and shoe departments as well as an area that sold radios, gramophones and gramophone records (only 78 rpm and no tapes or CD’s in those days) and some furniture items.  To the delight of young people like myself in those days, there was also a toy department - much magnified at X-mas time.  Larger furniture was housed on the top floor.

Fresh fruit and vegetables had to come up from Vancouver by boat and on the morning after the boat night, the ladies of the town were down to the store bright and early to have a good pick of the new produce.  Bread and cakes and the most delicious and exotic pastries were produced daily in the town’s bakery which was housed just across the street from the store in an annex of the hotel.

I have particularly fond memories of the company store having served, at various times, as grocery clerk, ice maker, and swamper on the grocery delivery truck.

The hotel was particularly popular with single men who lived in adjoining bunkhouses and had their meals in the large but inelegant hotel dining room - more of a mess hall - and who were the best patrons of the beer parlour on the ground floor and the pool and billiard tables.  Beer parlours and pool halls and tough young mill workers might seem like a rather explosive mixture but it is to the credit of the Ocean Falls hotel management that, although the boys could be noisy at times, rowdyism or violence were never condoned.

Just above the hotel and beside the rather steeply sloping street that separated the store and the hotel there was a neat little building that looked like someone’s well-kept summer cottage except that a sign on the door announced that this was the local dentist’s office.

Across the street from the dentist and just above the store was the post office.  On entering the door of the post office one was confronted with a long wall covered from floor to ceiling with mail boxes each fitted with a combination lock.  When the passenger ships from Vancouver arrived in the evening they brought the big canvas bags containing the mail.  These received great priority and were hurried up the hill to the post office where the post master and his assistant were waiting to sort the mail and put it in the boxes.  Within an hour or so after the boat had docked the town people started to congregate down at the post office and keep an eye on the glass front of their box to watch for their mail.  If one had a parcel, a card was put in the box but then one had to wait until all the mail was sorted before the parcel wicket would be opened.  And, oh, the excitement of a big parcel from Eatons with things specially ordered from the Winter Catalogue!

Next door to the post office and just at the top of the “Store Hill’ was the Fire Hall with its gleaming engine and its card-playing group of firefighters.  Pinochle was their game.  One doesn’t hear much about this anymore.  It was played with two 24 card packs (A-K-Q-J-10-9) of each suit and consequently the fire hall always had brand new 28 card packs (8-7-6-5-4-3-2) lying around.

The five buildings grouped on either side of the Store Hill were really the “down town” or “business district” of Ocean Falls although they were never thought of in those terms.

At the top of the store hill, Front Street flattened out and continued on eastward past a row of fine houses, green lawns, and well kept flower beds.  This was managers’ row and the houses were bigger and better than those in the rest of the town.  The designs were pleasing and each house was different from its neighbour.  Here and indeed everywhere in Ocean Falls, the houses were painted white with sometimes some brown trim.  Front Street was home to the hotel manager, the store manager, the chief engineer, the head of forestry and logging, the assistant manager of the mill, and the steam chief to name a few.

Before there was an Ocean Falls, a stream or river fell down over a rocky escarpment and entered the sea at the head of the inlet.  These were the “ocean falls”.  The mouth of this old river divides the townsite of Ocean Falls and the mill.  The two are joined by a short bridge over which the mill workers go to and fro with the changing of  the shifts.

All the houses on Front Street were on the north side.  On the south side there was a narrow strip of grass with a few ornamental trees and then a sharp drop off down a bank to the old river mouth.  And so the executives of Front Street had an unrestricted view of the mill paper machine buildings on the other side of the water.

Further up the street, and between the street and the very end of the bay, a long low building housed the swimming pool which was built somewhere around 1930 and paid for, at least in part, by profits from the beer parlour which the company felt should be spent on something of value to the whole community.  A beautiful pool it was, sixty feet long and twenty-five feet wide, white tile throughout and maintained at about 68°F.  The pool was extremely popular, particularly with the younger people, and developed some very fine swimmers and even a few international competitors.

Next door to the swimming pool a taller and older building contained bowling alleys in the basement, a moving picture theatre and a public library on the next level and a large dance hall on the top floor.

When I think of the little Ocean Falls library I remember Tom Swift, the gallant, courageous and clever hero of a series of at least 20 volumes of stories for boys.  I read every one of them but I’m afraid they were not enduring literature.

At the swimming pool and “picture show” area the road once again began to climb more steeply up what was known as the Dam Hill because, at its upper end it was just alongside one end of the big concrete dam which had been built many years before to provide the necessary copious supplies of good water and power which were so necessary for the pulp and paper mill.

Imagine a crisp, clear winter night with a good moon and the street lights of the town glistening on about a foot of recently fallen snow.  Now imagine yourself one of a group of six or eight young people climbing on a big long bobsled at the top of the Dam Hill and pointed down and poised for the long run all the way back down to the townsite wharf.  Wooden roads full of frost and covered with a little snow make for the most marvelous sleigh riding.  The first part of the ride down to the swimming pool is steep and the sled gets up to a good speed and is really whistling when it reaches the top end of the Front Street Houses.  Then a long block of fairly level road followed by a final burst of speed as the big sled rushes down the Store Hill and out across the wooden dock.  Under ideal sledding conditions it was sometimes necessary to plow into a big pile of coal on the dock to bring the fabulous half mile ride to an end.

Pardon the digression but when I stood, in memory, at the top of the Dam Hill and looked back down that long slope to the sea it began to get dark and cold and the snow began to fall and I was a boy again with a bob sled and a half dozen friends and I could hear those steel runners whistling over the ice and snow and the frozen wooden roads and the cries of encouragement from other groups pulling their sleighs up to the top for another ride.

Let’s have a look at some other parts of the town.  Instead of going up Front Street from the wharf we could have set off at right angles to Front Street and gone in a southerly direction towards the Caro Marion slope.  Now, very logically, we would pass Second, Third, Fourth and Fifth Streets and reach Sixth Street which was the highest street on the slope in this direction.

Between Front and Second, we would find the Women’s Dormitory on our right and the hospital on our left.  The Dormitory was home to our lady school teachers, some store clerks and mill stenographers, telephone operators, etc.

The hospital had 38 beds on two floors and was as well equipped and staffed as anything on the coast.  In a very large industrial plant like the pulp and paper mill, some very severe accidents will inevitably occur from time to time.  The doctors and nurses had a most enviable record in taking care of these as well as the more minor burns, scrapes and bruises of every day life.

The streets above the hospital were lined on either side with homes.  At the western end of Third Street, in an open area on a little bluff overlooking the bay to the west, was the largest single-family residence in town, the home of the resident manager.  It must be remembered that Ocean Falls was a company town where there was only the one employer and where that employer provided not only one’s job but also one’s house, power, fuel, telephone, entertainment, groceries and all other goods and services.  Therefore the manager was not only an industrial executive but also the mayor of the town, the landlord and in the position of trying to be all things to all the people.  It was a difficult job and rather a lonely one.

But let’s move on up the wide wooden road to 4th Street.  If we now turn right and go along for just a block we will find ourselves at the southwest corner of the “school grounds”.  This was a square open area about a short block on each side; a place for children to chase around and let off steam during school recess periods and for older folks to use for softball games in the evening.  Sometimes other special events such as Dominion Day celebrations were held at the school grounds.

The big square three storey elementary school stood on the slope on the north side of the school grounds with its front door on Fifth Street.  Still further back on the mountain side was the high school and behind that just the wild tangle of rocks and alders and evergreens that spilled down from the upper slopes of Mt. Caro Marion.

In those days the schooling at Ocean Falls was, I believe, exceptionally fine.  I suspect that the Company must have subsidized teachers’ salaries to attract the calibre of teachers which I had in those schools.  I consider myself fortunate to have had my pre-university schooling from such good people.

If we stood at the east end of Sixth Street we would see the elementary school on the south side and the high school on the north.  If we now walk west along Sixth for about a block we will arrive at House No. 626 where my family lived for more than twenty years.

It is to the credit of the Company that no two houses were identical but I would say that No. 626 was more or less typical and middle of the road.

Like many of the Ocean Falls houses ours was built on the side of the mountain with our front door about 10 feet off the ground and the back of the house right down on the earth.  Our house faced south with a view down over the harbour.  The front door opened into a long room which ran across the whole width of the house.  The left side of this room was the dining area and the right the living room.  The kitchen was behind the dining room and the main bedroom behind the living room.  Still further back were a sort of utility room, a small hallway and bathroom and another bedroom.  There was a third small bedroom on the second floor.  The rest of the upstairs area was an unfinished attic which my father used as a workshop.  When I was in High School I became fascinated with chemistry and tried to do some simple experiments at home.  As I said before, the front of our house was high off the ground and there was a big unfinished empty space underneath the dining and living rooms.  My Dad cut a doorway into this area under the dining room and made a beautiful little room for me to use as a laboratory.  And so, between the mill and my own little lab, I certainly got an early start for a technical career in the pulp and paper industry.

Just a word about our facilities back about 1925.  There was no central heating in the house.  There was a coal burning heater in the living room and a coal burning cook stove in the kitchen.  We had a wind up gramophone and a wall mounted telephone with a crank on one side to call up the switchboard operator.  In the utility area there was an icebox and a coal bin.  We also had a radio on which we listened to Amos and Andy and the hockey games.  My father was a real hockey fan.

Our house was towards the west end of the town.  Further east, past the two schools, other rows of houses ranged up the hillside and extended all the way across to the north end of the big dam.  All in all, there were about 200 private residences.  There were also five quite large apartment buildings and several bunk houses for single men.

Some of the public buildings have already been mentioned.  Others included a townsite office, three churches (Roman Catholic, United and Anglican), the court house, a branch of the Bank of Commerce, the Company guest house, a government liquor store, a good sized greenhouse, garages for the few company trucks, a marine oil and gas station, and even a set of stables for horses and horse-drawn vehicles.  When we arrived in Ocean Falls in 1924, there were still two or three horses and I remember that the household garbage was then collected by a horse and big cart.  By the 1930’s these were replaced by trucks.

There was, of course, no public transportation of any kind.  From the furthest house to the mill was no more than a ten minute walk.  Groceries, milk, ice, coal were all delivered to the houses by company truck as were any heavy items such as furniture.  The boys of the town lived on their bicycles but the rest of the population walked.  In the early 30’s my cousin, Major Bennet, brought in a motorcycle.  It was the first privately owned motor vehicle to come to the town.

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THE MILL

A book could be written about the mill at Ocean Falls.  It could describe the history of the mill, its construction and development over the years, the pulping and paper making processes used, the mill equipment, administration, products and sales and so on.  I certainly have no intention of getting into this kind of detail.  But to talk about Ocean Falls and not to say something about the mill, which was truly the life blood of the whole community, would be equally wrong.

I have travelled widely in the world and have visited dozens and dozens of pulp and paper mills but have never seen one that could match the Ocean Falls mill in diversity.  There are three widely used methods of converting wood into pulp for paper making.  One is known as mechanical pulping and is essentially a simple abrasion of wood in the presence of water.  Hold a block of wood against a wet rotating grindstone and you have mechanical pulp.  The other two processes are called chemical pulping; one treats wood with an acid solution to yield what is called sulphite pulp and the other uses an alkaline solution to produce kraft pulp.  ('Kraft' is simply a Swedish word meaning 'strong'.)  Kraft pulp mills are common and the combination of mechanical pulp and one chemical pulp is the norm for mills making newsprint.  But a single mill with all three pulping processes is a great rarity and such was the case at Ocean Falls.  This made it possible to produce a very wide variety of papers.  To name just a few - newsprint made from a mixture of mechanical and sulphite pulps, kraft papers for wrapping and bag manufacture, special bread-wrapping papers, toilet tissue.  There was one grade of paper that the paper makers called Montana Bull Hide because it was so heavy and strong.

Ocean Falls was a very isolated community with no road connection to the outside world and, in the 1930 era, no air service.  Everything had to come in by boat and that was a 24 hour trip from Vancouver.  The mill was therefore designed to be as self sufficient as possible.

Two huge pipes (generally called penstocks) brought water down from the lake to the mill.  One supplied the water needs of the mill and the town and the other went into the power house to generate the total electrical requirements of the community.

The mill had a pattern shop where wooden models were made of wheels and gears and levers, pump parts and piping, machine frames or whatever metal pieces were needed.  These models served as molds for the mill foundry where the molds were duplicated in metal.

There were large and well-equipped shops for almost every trade - machinists, sheet metal workers, electricians, pipefitters, millwrights, lubrication experts, painters, and even a blacksmith with his colourful forge.  Only very large or specialized maintenance work had to be done outside and brought in by boat.

A steam plant supplied heat for the mill and a good part of the town and the large quantities of steam needed to dry the paper as it was made on the machines.

The sawmill cut up the logs to supply blocks for mechanical pulping and woodchips for chemical pulping but was also equipped to cut lumber of all shapes and sizes for mill construction purposes and to maintain the town with its all-wooden houses and all-wooden roads.

And so the mill had something of everything and was an absolutely fascinating place as far as I was concerned.  There was a room where sulphur was melted and burned in a sort of a kiln.  With the smell of the sulphurous gases and the blue flames and the hot kiln it was a scene out of Dante's Inferno. In the kraft pulp mill there were recovery furnaces from each of which a stream of red hot molten sodium carbonate trickled out and fell with a great snapping and crackling noise into a tank of water below.  There was the spotless power house where the big generators spun with a quite hum and the air smelled faintly of ozone.  There was an elevated wooden flume about a half a mile long that transported the wood blocks from the sawmill to the grinders which made the mechanical pulp.  There were five paper machines - always a great attraction and particularly so when they would get into trouble and the paper makers were running around trying to set things straight again while waste paper would be piling up all over the floor.  The machine was then said to be 'haying out'.  There were three absolutely magnificent Corliss steam engines, each of which drove a complete paper machine.  In Kipling's poem, "McAndrew's Hymn", the Scottish engineer is talking about the steam engines on a liner and he says, "Lord, send a man like Robbie Burns to sing the Song o' Steam!"  I sympathize with his feeling of inadequacy.  There is a sense of majesty and power and precision about a big steam engine that is almost impossible to put into words.  Imagine, if you will, a spoked steel flywheel, painted a bright red, about nine feet in diameter and five or six feet across the face.  The flywheel is driven by two very large steam cylinder-piston-crank assemblies, one on either side.  In line with the big flywheel and about twenty feet away from it is a smaller pulley wheel.  Both it and the flywheel have grooved faces in which a continuous heavy manila rope travels.  The power of the flywheel is transmitted by the rope drive to the smaller pulley.  The pulley drives a line shaft about a block long and this, in turn, drives the various components of the paper machine.  The operating deck of this huge Corliss engine actually extends through the loop of the rope drive so that one can walk in with the multiple strands of the ropes beneath the floor boards at one's feet and whistling overhead.  To stand in the very heart of this wonderful engine, surrounded by all its intricately connected moving parts, was a never-to-be-forgotten experience and feeling - a feeling still fresh in my memory after more than 50 years.

There were also the big black and orange freighters that came in from Australia to load up with newsprint - boats with names like 'Wairuna' and 'Waitapu'.  The crew members brought with them coconuts and coral and pieces of sugar cane and souvenirs from the South Seas to trade for old books or magazines which the boys of the town had been saving up for this very purpose.  On one memorable occasion I hit the jackpot with a carved wooden model of an outrigger canoe.

And so to me, as a teenager, the mill was a most attractive place.  One of my good friends happened to be the son of the mill manager.  He shared my enthusiasm for the mill and we often made expeditions over there.  I am still surprised at some of the things we got away with.

For example, there were a number of battery operated vehicles call 'jitneys' which were used to move pallet loads of paper or bits of machinery.  The operator stood up at one end and steered them with a long handle like the tiller of a sailboat.  My friend Jim and I soon learned how these rigs worked and when no one was looking (Sunday was a good day), we would drive them all around in the basement of the mill.

There was also a railway of sorts that ran through the mill grounds and even over to the townsite on the other side of the bay.  The locomotive ran on a big load of storage batteries and was a squat sort of a vehicle like those that are used in mines.  We ran this too on a few occasions.

Alongside the mill wharves there was a paper warehouse at least a city block long and 25 or 30 feet high inside.  Right up under the roof and extending the full length of the building, there was a monorail along which ran a sort of a winch mechanism for lifting the heavy paper rolls.  This device was operated from a little cage attached to the winch mechanism.  By climbing up a very long ladder one could get into the cage - and we did and with our hearts in our mouths drove the whole apparatus the full length of the warehouse and back.  As I now recall, we only got up the nerve to do this a couple of times.  At the time I think I rather consoled myself with the thought that if we did get caught and got into trouble, having the manager's son for a companion would surely make things easier.

My attraction for the mill and my knowledge of it paid off in one way.  During the summer months the Canadian National Steamships carried a lot of tourists.  Depending on the amount of freight to be unloaded, these ships could be tied up at the townsite wharf for anything from about one to three hours and the tourists always got off to stretch their legs and look around.  A few boys, myself included, would offer to show a group of them around the mill.  Most people have never seen a paper machine in operation and it is a fascinating first experience.  I must say the tourists could ask some of the darndest questions but the top prize must go to the man who asked, "How far above sea level are you here?"  As informal mill guides we had no set schedules of fees and simply depended on the generosity of the tourists to hand out some tips when we returned them to the boat.

Another memorable feature of the mill was the mill whistle.  It was a very large steam operated whistle mounted on the roof of the steam power plant.  It sounded off seven times a day as follows and could be hear for miles.

7:00 a.m.  time to get up - one long blast

7:45 a.m.  start for work - two shorter blasts

8:00 a.m.  start work - one blast

12:00 noon Lunch time - one blast

12:45 p.m.  start back for work - two blasts

1:00 p.m.  start the afternoon's work - one blast

5:00 p.m.  time to quit - one blast

The whistle was also used to signal a fire with several long blasts.

When my brother Morley retired as mill manager and left Ocean Falls, they gave him the whistle!

I had a few jobs in the mill and will speak of them later but this seems a good place to give some account of the many years of service that my father and my brothers put in with Crown Zellerbach.

My father went to Ocean Falls in 1923.  His sister, Jessie, and her husband, Fred Bennet, were already living there and Dad stayed with them for some months until he could get a company house and bring the rest of the family up from Vancouver.  We were able to join him in the Spring of 1924 and moved into House 626 where the family lived until Dad retired about 1946.

Dad had always been a good mechanic and his first job was with the millwrights doing all manner of maintenance work, new installations, rigging, and construction work.  He was later put in charge of the pulp presses, a job which he held for many years.  This was a small, self-contained department with about a dozen employees.  Dad was the boss, all the rest were Japanese.

The whole idea of this department was to partially dry pulp and make it into big bales for shipment to paper makers in foreign lands.  To start the process, there were three or four 'wet machines'.  A wet machine has two essential parts - a big vat into which a very thin slurry of pulp is pumped, and a set of squeeze rolls like the wringer on an old-fashioned washing machine except that this wringer is about eight feet wide.  A continuous loop of wool blanket runs through the vat and then through the squeeze rolls and so back to the vat again.  The slurry in the vat contains only about 2% by weight of dry pulp.  The blanket (which is called the 'felt') picks up a coating of pulp and when it passes through the squeeze rolls, the pulp leaves the blanket and sticks to the top roll where it continues to build up.  And now comes the most remarkable component of the wet machine - the operator.  At Ocean Falls, the wet machine operators were all Japanese.  Each operator stood on a platform facing the squeeze rolls.  He carried a pointed hardwood stick about six feet long and he watched the pulp build up on the top squeeze roll.  When it was about half an inch thick, the operator took his stick and in an incredibly graceful and fluid manoeuvre ran the point of the stick across the face of the roll and so cut through the layer of pulp.  The machine continued to go at normal speed while he made this cut.  As the big sheet of pulp came loose from the roll, the operator rapidly folded it up on a sort of shelf just in front of the roll to make what was called a 'lap' of pulp.  I often wondered how the operators learned to do this trick with the wooden spear without either wrecking the blanket or the machine or being caught in the machinery.

The laps of pulp were subsequently made into a tall stack which was put into a very high pressure press which squeezed out a great deal more of the water.  The pulp finally reached a dryness of close to 50% and was tied with wires into 500 pound bales for shipment.

When the pulp markets were strong, my father would often work twelve hours a day and seven days a week to get a big order ready.  He took a lunch with him in the morning and I carried his dinner over to him about 5 o'clock in the afternoon.

My older brother Morley graduated from high school in Vancouver in 1924, the same year that we moved to Ocean Falls.  His first job was as the company messenger boy, a job which I also held some years later.  After one or two other relatively short-term jobs in the mill, Morley got the bottom-of-the-ladder job in the kraft pulp mill - cook's helper.  This had nothing to do with food.  The 'cook' in a pulp mill is the one responsible for the treatment of wood chips with chemicals to dissolve away a part of the wood and leave the cellulosic wood fibres.

In the Ocean Falls kraft mill, there were six rungs on the promotion ladder, starting with the cook's helper and ending as the mill superintendent.  Morley stayed with it for the whole climb and there surely was never a kraft mill superintendent who knew the mill better.

I should mention that there was one disadvantage to working in the kraft mill.  It was a very smelly place.  Indeed, one could smell the kraft mill anywhere in town when the wind was in the wrong direction.  Everyone who worked in the kraft mill had two lockers in a locker room near the mill entrance and quite remote from the smelly kraft mill.  When coming off shift, all the work clothes went into one locker.  Then one had a good hot shower and washed one's hair before putting on the clean town clothes from the other locker.  This was a never failing routine.

Some time after Morley became superintendent, he was again promoted to the job of assistant mill manager and eventually became mill manager.  As far as I know this was the one and only time that a local boy ever rose to the top job in the town.  Messenger boy to resident manager - unheard of!

My younger brother, Ellis, also worked for the company for many years.  He had first some jobs on the townsite and then went to work on the log booms.  He later worked with the company log scaler and then passed the government examinations to become a licensed B.C. log scaler.

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THE PEOPLE

In its heyday the population of Ocean Falls was, I believe, close to 2000 so it was certainly never a very big town.  In so many ways Ocean Falls was unique - quite different from other coastal towns of that era - and the make up of its population was no exception.

To begin with, Ocean Falls was a one industry company town.  With the exception of a very few provincial and federal government employees, every worker was on the mill payroll and he or she lived in a company owned house or apartment.  There was absolutely no provision for retirement living.  When one reached the mandatory retirement age there was no more job and no longer any available accommodation and one had no choice but to leave the town.  And so it was a town with very few older people.

It was also a regular League of Nations, not only in ethnic origin but also in its wide collection of direct immigrants from foreign lands.  I can easily remember and put names to people who came from the following countries:  Canada, United States, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Belgium, Australia, Italy, India, Japan, China, and Portugal.

In the block where we lived there were Australians, Americans, English, Swedes, French Canadians and Scotch - and so it was across the town.  One small area had so many Italian families that people called it ‘Little Italy’.

Scotland was very well represented.  Burns’ Night was always a big event with the piping in of the haggis and the singing of the old Scottish songs.  There was one old timer who had an extra nip or two every New Year’s Eve and then went out and paraded the streets in his kilt and played on his pipes.

Crown Zellerbach was an American company with several paper mills in the United States.  Some of the top executives at the Ocean Falls mill came from these American mills or from the head office in San Francisco.  A number of the paper makers had also come up from the southern mills.

Swedes and Norwegians were always common in the B.C. coast logging camps and in the nearby Bella Coola Valley and a number of them had been attracted to the easier life and better pay at Ocean Falls.

The work force in the sawmill was almost entirely Sikhs from the Punjab in India.  They were big strong fellows who seemed all the more imposing with their big beards and turbans.  They lived all together in one bunk house - no wives or children with them.  Their boss was a particularly huge man called Narien Singh.  He had a pair of big wooden dumb bells about three feet tall with which he used to exercise.  The Sikhs always seemed very serious and stern and to me as a child they appeared very mysterious and ferocious.

On the hillside at the west end of the town there was an almost separate community made up of four or five banks of closely spaced houses and some bunk houses.  This was “Jap Town”.  After all these years I find it hard to guess how many Japanese there were in Ocean Falls but there must have been several hundred.  Many of the men had their families with them and there was almost always a Japanese boy or girl in my school classes.  As a community the Japanese were clean, quiet and always polite.

Sometimes, on special Japanese holidays, my father would be invited to visit some of the homes of the Japanese who worked for him in the mill and I would go along.  We were treated as highly honored guests in the best Japanese tradition and always given green tea and wonderful exotic delicacies.

Many of the Japanese, and particularly the single men, were newly out from Japan and spoke very little English.  To take care of this situation the company had appointed two Japanese bosses called Ogawa and Oseki who acted as interpreters and as the suppliers of labor.  They determined who would work where and when.  The mill jobs held by the Japanese were always bottom level, helper types and their pay scale was below that of the rest of the employees.

When I was in high school a new Japanese United Church minister came to town and moved with his family into one of the houses in Jap town.  He spoke very little English but was anxious to learn.  I don’t remember how it came about but it was arranged that I would go to his house once or twice a week and help him with his English.  Here was a fine family trying to make the best of their move to a strange new land.  The minister was obviously well-educated and well read.  He was a fine figure of a man and had been quite a judo expert. I am quite sure that neither the minister nor his wife were ever invited to visit at any of the homes in the “white” section of town or to take part in any of the white social activities.  It is hard to understand why this attitude persisted.  There was no open hostility towards the Japanese.  It was as if they simply didn’t exist.

Perhaps the Japanese were happy to have steady jobs and did not too much resent their lowly status in the town.  I don’t know.  But when I think back on those years I cannot help but feel sorry for the Ocean Falls Japanese.  They could never aspire to any kind of a supervisory or better paid position and they had no part in the social life of the town.  When the war with Japan broke out after the Pearl Harbour attack in late 1941 the Canadian Government decided that all the Japanese on the West Coast posed a threat and they were all most cruelly uprooted and sent to other parts of Canada.  All the Japanese in Ocean Falls were evacuated and the whole of Jap Town burned down.  I am completely convinced that the Japanese people that I knew in Ocean Falls were peaceful citizens with no thoughts of doing harm to Canada or its people.  I also feel sure that the militaristic regime in Japan had far more important things on their minds than a possible invasion of an insignificant B.C. Coast town like Ocean Falls.

In my listing of the Ocean Falls nationalities I have included Chinese but there were really very few of these.  The company had a very nice guest house at which the cook/housekeeper/general manager was the very highly regarded Chinese Howe Ho.  Another small group was employed in the hotel as cooks and helpers.  No Chinese worked in the mill.

So this was the mix of peoples in Ocean Falls in the 1930’s.  Social activity was rather limited.  There were no night clubs and no restaurants and no cars nor anywhere to go even if there had been cars.  There was only the one moving picture theatre and it only got a new film about once a week.  On rare occasions a performing artist would come to town and put on a concert and about once a year a local amateur theatrical group would produce a play or a Gilbert and Sullivan.  Sometimes in the winters there were night school courses and these were well attended.  There were also occasional dances but for the most part people made their own evening entertainments.  Whist was still a popular card game and bridge seemed to be in  its infancy.  There were a few clubs and I remember that my mother was a faithful member of the Anglican WA (women’s auxiliary).  Occasionally the males in our family had to efface themselves for an evening when the WA met at our house.

For the young people of the town there were Cubs and Brownies and something call the Canadian Girls in Training, the CGIT.  About the time that I was starting high school a boys’ club was organized.  It must have been sponsored by the company.  An empty bunk house was taken over and refurbished with some old pool tables, card tables, a reading room and gymnastic equipment.  It was called the Owl’s Club and there was a big sign that said,

         “A wise old Owl sat in an oak

        The more he heard the less he spoke.

        The less he spoke the more he heard.

        Why can’t we be like that wise old bird.”

If the evening social activities were somewhat limited there was no end of sports and outdoor activities, weather permitting, which it often was not.  Swimming, boating, hunting, fishing, hiking, skiing, bowling, tennis, lacrosse, softball, football, badminton - all were available and every one had its faithful group of followers.

The biggest community event of the year was always Dominion Day.  Christmas was more of a family affair but the First of July was an occasion when the community really turned out.  For many years these celebrations were held at the big ball grounds up beside the lake.  It was a regular fair with hot dogs and soft drinks and a band and sports events.  The children’s races were early on the program with foot races, sack races, three-legged races and all the old favorites.  A great highlight for the young ones was the arrival on the field of the company fire truck bringing a present for every school child.  I still remember receiving a model airplane made of wire covered with a silky cloth. It had a propeller and a wind-up elastic drive and it flew very well.  The company paid for all such things - another example of good paternalism.

Adult races and sports followed during the day and there was always a big dance in the evening.  The old Canadian flag with the Union Jack on it was seen on porches and hanging out attic windows all over town.  It was one of the very few days in the year when the mill was shut down completely.

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MOUNTAINS

Perhaps the most famous of the earlier mountaineers to attempt to climb Mt. Everest was the Englishman, George Leigh-Mallory.  When he was once asked why he wanted to climb Mt. Everest, his famous reply was, "Because it is there".  To many people this must seem a silly and shallow answer but to those who have climbed mountains and felt the thrill of accomplishment at reaching a summit it is a true and profound statement.

I would never class myself as a real mountaineer, but I do know that the three mountains at Ocean Falls played an important role in my teenage life and that climbing them will always be remembered as one of the greatest joys I have ever experienced.

The easiest one to climb was called Sawmill Mountain because it was on the south side of the bay as was the company sawmill.  The trail went straight up through quite a dense stand of hemlock and cedar until it came out in an area of swampy mountain meadows.  From there it was quite an easy climb up through more scrubby timber until one came out on the rounded mountain top clothed with stunted trees and some type of heath or heather.  Of the three mountains, Sawmill provided by far the best view of the town below.

Once on top, we would make a fire, heat up our can of beans or whatever, make a pot of coffee and then sit around with the unforgettable smell of the heather in the air and look down to watch the lights come on in the mill and the houses below.  If we piled a little more fuel on our fire, the people in town would see our spark and know that we were safely on top of the mountain.

About the mid or late 1930's, some of the young people of Ocean Falls got the skiing bug and built a ski lodge near the top of Sawmill and cleared a few good ski runs.  One could hike up there in a matter of two or three hours.

Right across the bay from Sawmill Mountain, the much greater bulk of Mount Caro Marion loomed over the town of Ocean Falls spread out across its southern lower flanks.  At 4,033 feet it is the highest mountain for many miles around and is a most distinctive landmark standing like a great fortress at the inland end of Fisher Channel and Cousins Inlet.  It is roughly conical and circular with a base about two miles across.  The eastern face of the mountain looks down on the long narrow length of Link Lake from which the town and the mill drew their power and water.  On the west, quite spectacular cliffs drop almost perpendicularly from the high mountain plateau down to Martin Valley with its salmon river and pleasant meadows.  The south slope above the town must have been logged or burned over many years previously because it had grown up in alder with some sprinkling of young evergreens and so was not typical of the usual heavily wooded mountain sides of that region.  It may never have been particularly productive in any case because it was very steep and with many small bluffs and rocky outcroppings.  At the east end of the town a stream tumbled down through a shallow draw in the side of the mountain and into Link Lake.  A trail which roughly followed the course of this stream had been established and it was the usual route followed by those of us who climbed the mountain for pleasure and by the intrepid town hunters who sometimes went up there looking for mountain goat.  Perhaps the term 'trail' is misleading and rather too fancy a description of the hit-and-miss nature of this route up the mountain.  In some places it was merely the odd blaze on a tree trunk or some marks on a fallen log that showed the way.  One year a rock or snow slide high up on the mountain wiped out a good section of the 'trail' and then it was truly a matter of guess work.

The lowest part of the trail down near Link Lake led through some alder and scruffy shrubs but this soon changed to a dense forest of tall hemlocks and firs which continued on up to the timber line at about 3500 feet.  It was a very steep trail and I well remember how relieved we always were when we finally came out of the timber, crossed over the stream almost at its source and came out on the lower reaches of a plateau that ran around the south and west flank of the mountain at about this elevation.  We loved that plateau with its stunted trees and heather and its magnificent views.  In many areas it was solid granite rock with several big pools that filled with water from the winter snows and provided us with good swimming holes in the summer.  At the far western end of the plateau one could stand (if one had the courage) or lie flat on one's stomach and look down over the edge of the precipice that dropped to the Martin Valley below.  We used to throw rocks over and then count until we heard the rock land far below - it seemed forever!

To my teenage mind, that plateau was a magical place and so it seems to me even today.

It has been my good fortune to travel widely in the world and to see many famous scenes and places.  If the djinn of the magic lamp were suddenly to appear and grant me the privilege of revisiting three places on earth, I would have a hard time in deciding on the other two but I am sure that the plateau on Caro Marion would be on my list - to once again smell the mountain air, watch the ravens and the eagles and to have that feeling of being "monarch of all I survey".

The actual top of the mountain was about another 400-500 feet higher and it was almost completely bare of vegetation.  Earlier climbers had built a rock cairn on the summit and in the cairn was a tightly closed bottle in which was enclosed a little book where we entered our names and dates.  Although we climbed to the plateau many times, we rarely went on to the top.  It was a difficult additional climb and it didn't have the charms of the plateau area.

I must say the view from the summit was quite breath-taking.  One could turn through 360E and see mountain behind mountain behind mountain for perhaps fifty miles.  To the southwest there was the one long open slot of Cousins Inlet and Fisher Channel reaching far away to the open Pacific Ocean.

Caro Marion had another charm for me.  Far below the plateau and probably even less than a thousand feet above Link Lake, there was a small surprisingly flat area on an otherwise particularly steep and heavily wooded section of the mountain side.  This was known as "The Scout Flat" because, at an earlier date, a troop of Boy Scouts had built a small log cabin there.  Several other cabins had been built later by teenage Ocean Falls boys who used to go up and spend weekends there during the summer months.  I was accepted as a member of one of these cabins.  Our cabin was right beside the big mountain stream and had a great view down on the lake.  The work that was done in carrying things up to those cabins was phenomenal - floor boards, one at a time, rolls of tar paper, old windows, frying pans, pots and pans; even cast iron stoves were taken apart and lugged up the mountain, a piece at a time.  When we were up there we seemed to spend all our time making meals, cutting firewood, and repairing and improving the cabin but we all thought it was great.

We were always hiking on the mountains in those days.  One summer day, a friend and I packed lunches, put on our hiking boots and set off to climb up on the side of Caro Marion at the west end of the town.  There was no trail at all on this side of the mountain and the slope was very steep with a lot of solid granite rock showing through in many places.  But there were enough bushes and small gnarled trees that we could use to pull ourselves up and we kept on climbing without giving any thought as to how we were going to get down again.  We had no ropes nor climbing gear nor any real knowledge of this type of climbing.  It was a matter of scrambling up through the greenery.  Unfortunately, we eventually reached a spot where the trees gave out, and ahead of us (and above us) was nothing but steep bare rock.  We then discovered that we couldn't go back down with any safety.  A sort of a vein stood out on the face of the rock and led across the bare rock for perhaps twenty feet where we could see another patch of bushes that seemed to afford a reasonably promising route upwards.  Spread-eagled against the cliff and with our hearts in our mouths, we inched across this horrible spot and so were able to continue on but by then we were wondering how we were ever going to find a way down.

I remember that we sat with our backs against the slope and our feet braced in the roots of small trees below us and ate some of our lunch.  We had with us an axe that  we took turns carrying.  Soon after lunch my friend McKenzie had the axe and was coming up maybe ten or twenty feet below me.  He called up and said, "I can't hang on to the axe and get up here.  Can you come down and reach it?"  After very carefully considering the situation I said, "Leave the axe there".  It was just that ugly a job to go back down for it.

About mid-afternoon, we very suddenly came out into a clear area covered with heather and of a much gentler and really quite easy slope.  To my absolute astonishment it soon became apparent that we were on the lower reaches of the big plateau!  We had climbed Caro Marion by a route that I am quite sure had never been used before.  I also feel safe in supposing that it has also never been used again.

Once having reached the plateau it was, of course, a very simple matter to traverse around to the east and come down off the mountain by the regular trail.

Our third mountain was Baldy, two or three miles east of town on the far side of Link Lake - a great round plum pudding of a hill with a decorative icing of snow from October until May.  It was treed on the lower slopes but, true to its name, was almost bare rock or low scrubby trees over much of its height.

The route up Baldy was long and slow and it was also necessary to make a boat trip on the lake to get to the start of the trail.  With these disadvantages, Baldy was much more seldom climbed that the other two mountains but about once each summer someone would organize a Baldy expedition and about 20 or 30 people would sign up and make the trip.  It was commonly a two day affair with everyone taking along a couple of blankets or a sleeping bag.  Several of the climbers would also take along mirrors to flash back to the people in town.  A big bonfire on the mountain in the evening was also plainly visible from the town.

I made the trip up Baldy only twice.  I remember that on my second trip the weather was unusually hot and that there was not a breath of wind.  On the top of the mountain, the mosquitoes and no-see-ums were abroad in their thousands and the only way we could get any peace was to submerge ourselves in one of the big pools in the rock.

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JOBS

I graduated from high school in Ocean Falls in 1933 and attended the University of British Columbia in Vancouver from 1933 until 1940.  During my last few years in high school and every summer while I was at UBC, the Crown Zellerbach Company always found some work for me to do to earn money.  These were the so-called Dirty Thirties when unemployment was particularly high and I was very lucky to have my home in Ocean Falls where the Company did everything in its power to help out the young people, particularly those of us who were striving to get a higher education.  Some of the jobs on which I worked lasted only a week or so; others for a whole summer.  As nearly as I can now remember, here are the various jobs that I had together with a note or so about them.

CUTTING GRASS - The company maintained some quite nice gardens around such public buildings as the hospital, offices, guest house and at the Front Street homes of the executives.  Some of the youngest employable boys were hired in the summer to cut the grass and trim the edges.  There were actually more boys than there was work and so each of us worked only a half day.  The pay was 25 cents per hour and it was the first paying job I ever had.

TELEPHONE OPERATOR - The total population of Ocean Falls in those days was about 2000 people.  Some lived in the hotel, some in bunkhouses or dormitories and quite a few in the Japanese section of the town where there were few, if any, phones.  The rest of the people lived in private residences most of which had phones but these numbered only a few hundred.  The mill offices and the public buildings were all pretty well equipped with phones as well but the grand total number of phones was small enough so that all connections were handled on a single panel switchboard by a single operator.  My cousin was a regular operator and thanks to her I got a job as a relief operator.  In this day of our fancy push button phones with all the options such as answering machines, call-waiting, cellular phones, cordless phones, etc., it is perhaps worth describing how our Ocean Falls system worked.  The operator sat in front of a switch board that was perhaps three feet high and less than that in width.  This board had many (I am sure it was less than 1000) little hinged trap doors arranged in regular rows and columns.  When a caller wished to make a phone call, he or she turned a little crank at their phone and this generated enough of a current to make their little trap door on the switchboard fall forward to expose a hole for a phone jack.  On the desk part of the switch board, the operator had a double row of jacks each attached to a long cord.  When a trap door opened, the operator plugged one jack into this hole and said into a mouthpiece, "Number, please".  Sometimes the caller gave a number but more often they simply said, "Give me Mr. (or Mrs.) so and so, please".  The regular operators had the whole board memorized but beginners like me had often to look up the number.  The corresponding jack from the second row was then plugged into the so and so number and the operator turned another crank to summon the second party to their phone.  At a busy time of the day the whole board could be a mess of cords all criss-crossed in every direction.  And sometimes one ran out of cords completely.

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MESSENGER BOY - The Company messenger boy had two main functions.  The first was to deliver reports, letters and memos between the various offices and departments of the big mill.  This included making two trips a day through the whole mill to deliver mail to, and to pick up mail from each of the mill departmental offices.  The second part of the job was to report each hour during the day to the wireless office on the town side and there to pick up all incoming messages and then deliver them personally to anyone in the town to whom they were addressed.  The messenger boy had dozens of bosses and every one of them felt that his job should be at the top of the messenger boy's list.  The messenger boy used a bicycle - and needed one!

OFFICE HELP - At various times, I checked invoices in the shipping department, helped with mimeographing and the other chores in the stationery department, and made blue prints for the engineering department.

ICE MAN - Refrigerators were a real rarity in those days and most people had ice boxes in their homes.  The Company maintained an ice making plant in the ground floor of the department store and delivered the ice by truck all over the town.  For some time I made the ice.  One filled big containers with water, immersed them in a cold brine solution until the water froze, then hauled up the containers, dumped the ice out and cut in into suitably sized blocks.  Hauling out the containers was good for the muscles.

CLERK IN THE GROCERY STORE - In the Company store there were separate areas to buy groceries, fruit and vegetables, and meat.  I worked sometimes as one of four grocery clerks.  We each stood behind our counter in our white coats with the groceries stacked on shelves behind us.  We had order pads on which we wrote out the various items that the Customer wanted and priced all the purchases.  The customer took the order to a central cashier in a kind of a cage and paid the bill.  In the meantime we made up the order, bagged it and had it ready when the customer brought back the bill.  The store also provided free home delivery.  A larger order for delivery was written up in the usual fashion but then the order slip was sent to a downstairs area where a couple of other clerks made up the order and put it in a box ready for the delivery truck.  I sometimes also worked at this downstairs job.  If I happened to find my mother's order, her ten pounds of potatoes might miraculously increase to eleven pounds by the time it was delivered.

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LONGSHORING - The passenger boats that stopped in Ocean Falls also brought in the groceries, fresh fruit and vegetables, meat, and all manner of goods and supplies, even including smaller bits of machinery and sundry mill supplies.  Some young fellows like me were hired to handle two-wheeled hand trucks and bring all these goods ashore.  It was commonly between two and four hours of work every time a Canadian Pacific or Canadian National ship came in.  They say there are tricks in every trade and we soon discovered that there was a real knack involved in loading, trucking and unloading all the different shapes and sizes and weights which came our way.

TALLYMAN - all the logs that came into the mill had to be measured to determine the price that had to be paid to the log supplier and to establish the taxes or "stumpage" to be paid to the government.  The measuring process was called "scaling".  Most of the wood was scaled by both a government scaler and a company scaler.  I spent a good part of one summer as tallyman for the company scaler.  It was a good job; not too hard work, outdoors, and a great chance to learn about the scaling profession.

A SCALER had two tools - his training and experience and his scale rule.  This latter was a six foot wooden stick marked in inches and with a metal bar about a foot long fastened to it at right angles on one end.  To measure a log the scaler held the scale rule by a handle on one end with the length of the rule held out horizontally in front of him.  He walked along the log, bobbing the rule up and down as he went to measure the length.  He then measured the small-end diameter by using the metal hook.  With these two measurements, a formula was then used to calculate the number of board feet of lumber which could be cut from the log.  The formula made allowances for all the usual sawmilling wastes such as saw kerf and slabs and edgings.

Now all this is fine for a nice straight sound log of an even taper, but in point of fact a high percentage of the logs had some fault - a broken end, a slab missing, a split over part of the length, a bad crook, a hole in one end, rotten knots, an uneven taper, etc.  And this is where the skill, training and experience of the scaler came into play.  He had to make an assessment of these faults and then decide how much deduction to make.  And he didn't have all day to do it.  The scaler's report on a log was just two figures - the length and the small end diameter and so, in his judgement, he made his deductions for fault by reducing one or both of these measurements before entering the numbers on the tally sheet - knock four feet off for a bad hole or split; reduce the diameter by two inches because of a crook, and so on.  Most scalers, whenever they had the chance, like to get into the sawmills and watch the logs come in and be opened up by the big band saws so that they could improve their knowledge of just how much waste was caused by a rotten knot or a hole or other defect.

My job as the tallyman was to carry a board with the tally sheet on it and write down the measurements as the scaler called them out.  When we scaled a bag boom where the logs lie all helter skelter, it was also my job to keep track of which logs had been scaled and which had not.  When we finished scaling a boom, the scaler would assign a number which had to be carved on a swifter stick with an axe.  This was also the tallyman's job - how I hated the figure 8 - the middle of my 8's had a bad habit of falling out!

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CHAINMAN - a government land surveyor showed up one summer, presumably to re-establish the exact positions of a number of plots of forest lands in the general vicinity of Ocean Falls.  I got a job acting as one of two chainmen.  It was a short job; just a couple of weeks, but it had some interesting points.  Most of the time we were in thick stands of timber and sometimes as much as two or three miles away from the mill and town.  These areas had been surveyed many years previously and in doing the resurvey the land surveyor was looking for earlier surveyors marks.  Occasionally we were able to locate an ancient corner post - a chunk of red cedar almost completely rotten but with sometimes a few of the original survey numbers still faintly visible carved on the cedar.

When our land surveyor reached and established a corner we were told to make a corner post.  We then looked around for a nice little red cedar tree about 6 to 8 inches in diameter, took an axe and squared about a 4 or 5 foot length of the trunk with the tree still standing.  We then cut it down and made our post.  Numbers were carved into the post with a knife.  I suppose cedar posts like this could be good for about twenty years.

Our main job as chainmen was to measure lengths with a very long steel tape.  In land surveying, a chain is a distance of 66 feet.  At some time in the past actual chains were used instead of the steel tapes.

We also had to clear brush and occasionally cut down trees to give the surveyor a clear line of sight.

At the end of this job, the surveyor wanted to establish a very good and permanent reference point at the southeast end of the Ocean Falls bay beside the company sawmill.  He drilled a hole about 4 inches deep in a granite outcropping with a hammer and cold chisel.  In this hole he placed a very loosely fitting brass pin with a cross cut in the top.  He then melted some sulphur in a little ladle and poured this in around the pin.  Molten sulphur expands when it solidifies and so anchored the pin most securely.  On every job one learns something worth while.

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SANDING FLOORS - My first job as a boss - I had a helper!.  All the houses in Ocean Falls were of wooden construction throughout and the floors were made of three quarter inch thick tongue-and-groove old-growth Douglas fir.  They were excellent floors and had been well laid but many had been treated with a very dark stain and had become badly worn from many years of use.  Work boots, and even cork boots in some cases, had literally worn paths in some of those floors.

We had an old fashioned, heavy old beast of a power drum sander but it did the job.  A very coarse grade of sand paper ripped off the old stain and varnish and knocked the top off the worst of the hills.  A medium grade finished the levelling and wiped out the marks left by the coarse grits.  A final going over with fine paper left the floor looking beautiful and ready for re-varnishing.  The machine could not sand into the corners nor close enough to the walls and these areas had to be dressed by hand with a scraper.

Sanding floors was a most satisfying kind of job; the rooms looked so much cleaner, brighter, and even larger when we had finished and the people who lived in the houses were always so delighted with the result.

CARPENTER'S HELPER - It was my good fortune to work for some time as a helper to a townsite carpenter called Bill Cooey.  Bill was originally from the United States but had been in Ocean Falls for many years.  He was a tall, thin (one might almost say gangling) man with a bushy Mark Twain moustache, soft spoken and with a good but quiet sense of humour.  When I worked with him in the 1930's he must have been in his late 50's or early 60's, an old bachelor type who lived in a room in the hotel, had all his meals there, and didn't seem to have any close friends.  One would have to guess that Bill had been well educated and that he came from a good family.  His hotel room was full of books and he was a particular lover of John Ruskin's works and felt that Ruskin's comments on style and architecture were valuable guides to good design in woodworking.

One day in the shop one of the other carpenters came over to where Bill and I were working and said, "Can I use your saw, Bill?"  Bill quietly handed him the saw and said, "You may try."  The lesson in grammar was, of course, completely wasted on the saw borrower.  I am sure that the other two carpenters in the shop considered Cooey to be a harmless but eccentric old coot.  They were rough construction carpenters; Bill Cooey was a cabinet maker.  He was incapable of doing sloppy work.  If one of the ladies in town put in a request for a bit of a fence with a gate in it across one end of her porch so that the baby couldn't fall out, then Bill would go to the house with his folding rule and a bit of Beaver board on which to make notes.  He would check everything carefully and get all the dimensions he needed and then return to the shop.  On another scrap of Beaver board he would make out his full bill of materials, assemble all the necessary lumber, take it to the table saw and do all his cutting at once - never a wasted motion.  When the job was finished, the little gate swung as perfectly on its hinges as the door on a piece of fine furniture.

When I went in to work one morning, Bill handed me two pieces of wood jointed and glued together to form a T.  The joint is a little hard to describe but it was dovetailed in two directions so that it seemed that it would have been impossible to put it together.  He had made it as a trick just for me to see if I could determine how it had been done.  He was delighted when I did finally figure it out.  He also liked to see if I could calculate some crazy compound angle needed for some special piece of rafter lumber.  With a half a page of trigonometry and a book of tables, I would arrive at an answer.  Bill would then make two or three passes with his steel square and draw the correct angle on a piece of wood.  Lesson:  Never under-estimate the knowledge of a good tradesman.

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LAND CLEARING - I graduated from high school in 1933 and that summer worked with a small gang of men who were clearing land in the nearby Martin Valley.  The intention was to build a nine-hole golf course out there but business became very poor soon after that and the project was abandoned.

The area in which we were working had been logged many years before and our main problem was to remove the stumps.  Some of these were up to six feet in diameter and six feet high.  We excavated around the bases, lit fires, used dynamite, pried at them with levers twelve feet long, pulled on them with a team of horses, and gradually worried them out and burned them up.

At the end of our school year we had written government university-entrance examinations which were sent in to Victoria for marking.  One day while I was working at this land clearing job, a wireless message was delivered to me to say that I had obtained the highest marks in the school district in these examinations.  What an excitement at home that night!

BROKE BEATER OPERATOR - This requires a couple of definitions:  "Broke" is a papermaking term for any waste paper from a paper machine, whether it be substandard in quality or trimmed off edges or whatever.  All such waste can be macerated in water and so converted back into a thin pulp slurry which can be re-used.  The "Beater" is the big machine where the waste paper is beaten up with water.  A typical broke beater is a vat about four feet deep, twenty feet long and eight feet wide.  The vat has semicircular rounded ends and a partition down the middle to within about four feet of either end to make a big trough around which the slurry of broke and water can be circulated.  A big drum fitted with steel bars and driven by an electric motor fits snugly into one side of the trough.  The rotating bars break up the waste paper and thoroughly mix it with water.

The paper making machines were on the second floor of the building.  All the broke was dropped through holes in the floor into a huge bin about the size of a small house on the ground floor.  If a machine was running very well then very little broke was produced and the broke bin might be almost empty.  If, however, the machine was having trouble and therefore making lots of off-quality paper, great slabs of paper would be rejected and thrown down into the broke bin.

It was the job of the broke beater operator to pull the broke out of the big bin, put it in the beater and beat it up with water until it was well disintegrated, then empty the beater and start a new batch.

This was surely not the best job I ever had - hard work, repetitive, and not much to learn.

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PAPER TESTER & PAPER INSPECTOR - In the Spring of 1936, I completed my third year at the University of British Columbia.  Money was very scarce in those days and I decided to take a year off and get a job in the mill to earn enough to see me through the next two years of my Chemical Engineering course.  And so I worked for more than a year in the huge room where the five Ocean Falls paper machines were housed - first as a paper tester and later in the more lordly position of a paper inspector.

The paper machines ran twenty four hours a day and so the testing and inspection jobs were shift work; either eight in the morning until four in the afternoon, or from four p.m. until midnight, or from midnight until 8 a.m.  They were commonly called day shift, 4 to 12, and graveyard.  I rather liked 4 to 12; one slept at more or less normal hours but had a good part of the daylight hours off.

The paper testing station was a long bench equipped with all the necessary pieces of testing equipment - a scale for determining the weight of the paper, a drying oven for finding the moisture content, a caliper gauge for measuring thickness, a tearing strength tester, an apparatus for measuring the tensile or breaking strength, a brightness meter, and other gadgets for measuring porosity, oil absorption, water resistance and bursting strength.

When paper is being produced on a paper machine, it is wound up on a metal spool to form a huge reel the full width of the machine.  At Ocean Falls, three of the machines were 16 feet wide each and the other two somewhat less.  When a reel reaches the desired diameter, it is taken off the paper machine and a new reel started.  The reels are transferred to another machine called a winder which trims the edges of the wide sheet and cuts it into rolls to suit the customer.  You will pardon this brief lesson in paper making.  I am trying to set the stage to explain my duties as paper tester and paper inspector.

As each reel came off the paper machine, samples of the paper were taken and delivered to the paper testing station.  With five paper machines and one paper tester and reels turning up about every 30 to 40 minutes on each machine, I can assure you that the tester seldom had any spare time.

Many different kinds of paper were made on the five paper machines with every colour in the rainbow and ranging from flimsy tissues to products almost as heavy as cardboard.  Each grade and type had its own specifications which had to be met and the paper tester and inspector had the authority to prohibit shipment of substandard paper.  We were not always popular with the paper makers and sometimes they tried to fool us.  If paper is too dry it becomes brittle and loses strength and so a moisture content of about 7% or even a percent or two higher is desired.  But on the paper machines, and particularly on those making light weight papers like newsprint, it is difficult to hold the moisture up without getting some wet streaks or operating problems.  Therefore, some of the more crafty operators devised a system for running the paper fairly dry but then introducing a little extra moisture into the samples which they submitted for testing.  One scheme was to carry the moisture sample around under one's arm to get some sweat on it.  Another was to be sure that neither the tester nor the inspector was watching and then to hold the moisture sample in a steamy place for a few seconds.  The worst offenders soon became known to us and we would make a point of being an hand as the reel was taken from the machine so that we could take our own samples.

There are other faults in paper which do not show up by the physical testing of samples. These include such things as excessive dirt, holes, cuts, wrinkles, poorly wound rolls and ragged edges.  It was the job of the paper inspector to go back and forth from one paper machine to another and watch  the paper being made and rewound and to try to ensure that bad paper did not find its way to the customer.  Of course, it was a black mark against any machine crew that produced too many discards and so, once again, it was not too unusual to try to put one over on the inspector.  When I was an inspector I learned a lot about paper and also some about human nature.

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MISCELLANEOUS JOBS - Without going into detail, I can mention some other jobs that were either short-lived or not particularly interesting.  These would include painting the outside of houses in the town, cleaning the inside of a big power boiler, some pulp testing in the mill laboratory, part time manager at the swimming pool and half of a two man demolition job to remove a huge wooden tank in the mill.

ASSISTANT TO A STONE MASON - This was a non-paying, one-time job and the stone mason was my father.  Dad had worked at several jobs in his life but his main trade was stone masonry.  He and his brother, Harry, had worked together making monuments (grave stones) in Vancouver but Dad finally left this business and moved to Ocean Falls where he found good work in the mill as a mechanic and later as a departmental supervisor.

We attended the Anglican church and my father volunteered to make a christening font.  He arranged to have three blocks of fine white marble sent up to him from Vancouver and found a spot in one end of the sawmill where he could work and have access to compressed air which he needed to drive his stone working tools.

I don't know that I was really a great deal of help on this job, but I did what I could and it was wonderful to see this fine piece of work take shape.  My memory says that it was about 40 inches tall.  It was made in three pieces - a base, a pedestal and a top in which the circular christening bowl of the font was cut.  Each piece was octagonal in cross section.  On one of the eight flat faces of the top piece, Dad carved a big IHS monogram.  I have heard this interpreted as either, 'I HAVE SUFFERED' or 'JESU HOMINUM SALVATOR' (Jesus, Saviour of man).  the other seven faces were used to carve 'SUFFER LITTLE CHILDREN TO COME UNTO ME'.  All the lettering was finished in gold leaf.

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WORKIN' ON THE BOOM

I spent a couple of summers working on the boom at Ocean Falls.  It was a fine outdoor job, guaranteed to give one a great appetite and to put on a few new muscles.  One disadvantage was Ocean Falls' notorious wet climate which meant that on many days the boom men were awkward in their tin pants and coats or Black Diamond rubber outfits.  I should explain that tin pants were made of a very heavy sort of khaki-coloured denim or canvas and treated with some kind of water repellent that made them so hard when they were wet that they would stand up by themselves.  Even so, they were not 100% water proof and would be wet through by the end of a typical Ocean Falls rainy day.  The Black Diamond rubberized cloth was 100% waterproof but for that very reason one perspired profusely.  This is what is known as a Mortimer’s Fork - you could wear tin clothes and get wet from the outside or Black Diamond and get wet from the inside!  Never mind, the young fellows like me didn't mind it too much and the old timers were so used to it that they scarcely noticed.

A boom, of course, refers to a boom, or raft, of logs and 'workin' on the boom' means wearing ten inch high boots with steel spikes in the soles and running around on these floating logs and learning not to fall in the ocean too often!  The steel spikes are 'caulks' and the boots were always call 'cork boots'.  Complete equipment for a boom man included a pair of cork boots, more or less waterproof rain gear and an eight to ten foot long pike pole with which to push or pull the logs.

There were three kinds of booms.  The simplest was called a bag boom and was a mass of randomly oriented logs held in place by a surrounding string of logs (boom sticks) chained together end to end.  Bag booms were just for harbour use.  They were no good for long distance travel because in any kind of sea or rough weather the logs could too easily get out of the boom and be lost.

The commonest type of boom was the flat raft.  Here the logs were packed in side by side over a width of about sixty feet and in end to end tiers to a total length of anything from about 200 feet to more than 500 feet.  The logs were contained in a rectangle of boom sticks, one boom stick in width and several in length.  To make the flat rafts more seaworthy, extra logs called swifter sticks were placed cross wise on top of the floating logs.  Swifter sticks and boom sticks were all fastened together with heavy metal boom chains which passed through holes in the ends of the sticks.

In order to open up these flat rafts and get the logs out to feed the big sawmill, it was first of all necessary to remove some of these boom chains and pull off the swifter sticks.  When a young fellow like myself went to work on the booms, the old-timers would impress on him that boom chains were costly and that great care should be taken not to let any of them drop into the ocean.  We were told, "If you are carrying a boom chain and feel yourself slipping, don't let go of the chain - just hang on and the chain will carry you to the bottom and you can walk ashore" - standard boom man joke!

In order to transport logs over very long distances and in bad weather and rough seas, the deep-sea raft was invented.  We called them Davis rafts.  At Ocean Falls, Davis rafts came in from the Queen Charlotte Islands and so had to be towed by huge and very powerful tug boats across a broad stretch of the open Pacific Ocean.  Sometimes tides, wind and waves would be so contrary that even with the biggest and strongest of the tugs, the crews would consider themselves lucky if they could keep the big rafts in one piece and off the rocks and perhaps make as little as a mile or two's progress in a whole day.

The Davis raft was essentially a huge cylinder of logs, maybe thirty or forty feet in diameter and often three hundred and sixty feet long.  It was held together by wire cables wrapped completely around the cylinder and fastened with special cable clamps.  Wood is just about half as heavy as water and so a Davis raft floated with half the cylinder under water and half above.  The cables were fastened to especially big logs called side-sticks that ran along the length of the cylinder at the water level on either side.  Side sticks were normally one hundred and twenty feet long.  We once encountered a Sitka spruce side stick that was 10+ feet in diameter at the big end.  It was cut into three 40 foot longs and each log cut in half down the length.  When the butt log was split and the two halves fell open on the water one was looking at a rectangle of gleaming white spruce wood without a knot or blemish in sight and forty feet long and more than twenty feet wide - what a giant!

I worked for some time with the crew that broke the Davis rafts.  We had a big log float or platform on which were mounted a steam-driven winch or 'donkey engine' and a great tall A-frame made of two side sticks lashed together at the peak of the 'A'.  Cables from the winch ran up through pulleys at the top of the 'A' and were used to put the cables off the Davis raft and give the raft a shake to make it fall apart.

What a spectacular sight it was when the last cable was pulled free and a side stick was given a sudden pull from the donkey engine; the whole great mass of logs, each averaging about 40 feet in length and up to five or six feet in diameter, tumbled down over one another and slid out into a large ocean area fenced in by a long string of boom sticks.  Our steam winch operator - the donkey puncher - was a Scandinavian called Morris Benson and I always felt that it gave him great delight, and perhaps a feeling of real power, when he would produce those final few jerks on the wire cable that would cause the big raft to fall apart.

Benson had spent most of his life in logging camps and, like many other west coast loggers, had acquired the 'snuce' habit.  In other words, he was an inveterate chewer of Copenhagen Snuff.  He was never without his little round tin of snuce.  He would take it out of his jacket, give a couple of raps on the lid to settle the tobacco down inside, the take off the lid and reach in with a thumb and forefinger and bring out a good liberal pinch.  This was deposited between his lower lip and his front teeth to be enjoyed at leisure.

One of the crew asked Benson one day why he didn't quit this bad habit.  Benson replied, "Vell, you know, I did qvit von time.  I vas vorking up at the head of Roscoe Inlet and von off the boys in the camp wrote avay about an ad in a magazine on how to qvit the tobacco habit.  The company sent him all kinds of stuff - some pills and a mouth vash and a sort of a chewing gum.  He let me use this stuff too and, by golly, it really vorked.  I got right off the snuce.  Then von day I vas goin' into town on the gas boat and I found a can of snuce in a sort of a cupboard.  Vell, I tought I would yust try a little bit.  It tasted yust terrible.  You know, it took me more dan a month before I could really enchoy a good chew of snuce again."

To get back to the business of breaking Davis rafts I should explain that when the raft broke and spread out into the big enclosing pond, a lot of the logs were still crisscrossed on top of one another and aimed in every direction.  These crossings of logs were called jackpots and they all had to be undone until every log was floating free.  Only then could the logs be broken up into a number of small bag booms to be towed to the sawmill.

To break jackpots we had a small, gasoline driven winch on a little float which we tied up at the side of the big pond.  One man ran the winch and the other man (me!) took a pike pole in one hand and the hook end of a long cable attached to the winch in the other and set out on to the horrible jumble of longs in the pond.  It is really quite easy to walk around on flat rafts with cork boots.  The logs are all nicely packed in an held in place by the swifter sticks but it is quite a different matter to try to stay dry on a bag boom where the logs can shift around and that much more exciting again in a pond of logs full of jackpots, spaces of open water and encumbered by a heavy steel hook and dragging fifty feet of wire cable.  The proverbial cat on a hot tin roof could have taken lessons from me as I hopped and skipped around over the tangle of logs from the broken Davis raft.  The idea, of course, is to use the winch to pull one log off the top of another or to roll logs around until all logs are floating free.  It sounds easy but it isn't.  As soon as I would fasten on to one log and signal the winch man to pull, he would take up the slack and then all the logs in that area would start to move.  An open space of ocean would suddenly open up and it was not uncommon to find oneself in danger of being marooned in such an open space on a quite inadequate log quietly sinking under one's weight!  Then it was a flying leap to reach a safer spot - oh! it was great fun.

One more episode before I leave the booms.  As a part of the pulp making process, the mill used large quantities of lime rock (which is calcium carbonate and actually a type of marble).  There was a big lime rock deposit about 50 miles away near the town of Namu and the lime rock was brought from there on large scows.  On one occasion I went as deck hand on a company tug on a lime rock trip.  This was a very good deal for me as the round trip took more than sixteen hours and I was paid at my regular hourly rate for every hour that we were away.

We towed an empty scow down to the quarry and there exchanged it for a full scow.  Our tow boat was not a particularly powerful one and the return journey was very slow indeed with the scow refusing to tow straight and veering all over the inlet.

We arrived back in Ocean Falls in the middle of the night.  It was pouring with rain in a real Ocean Falls fashion.  The scow had to be manoeuvred to a spot close to the mill on the south side of the bay and then tied up to the booms.  The tow boat captain was a good friend and neighbour called Archie McDonald.  In spite of the dark and the terrible weather, he very skilfully controlled the heavy scow and finally got it into the right position and held it against the boom with the bow of the boat pushing against the middle of the scow.

It was now my job to tie up the scow.  I had on the heavy Black Diamond rain pants and jacket and was further burdened with a pike pole and with two long and heavy wire cable straps slung over my shoulder.  While Archie held the scow in place, I had to climb from the bow of the boat onto the scow, walk around the very narrow gangway on the side of the scow and around to the far side where I was completely out of sight of the captain.  I then had to climb down onto the wet boom logs, find boom chains, fish them up with my pike pole, fasten one end of each wire strap to a boom chain and the other to the scow - all this in the heavy rain and practically no light.  I hate to think what would have happened if I had fallen in or been caught between the logs and the scow.  I really wondered at the time how long Archie would wait for me to show up again and come back aboard the tow boat - or what he would do if I didn't show up!  I think I earned my 16 hours pay in that brief period.

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EMORY LEWIS

When I first knew Emory Lewis he was the engineer on a government forestry launch called the Eucluetaw (named after a coastal Indian tribe).  Emory was neither tall nor heavy but seemed somehow compact and solid with tight curly grey hair and a weather beaten look.  He was a true blue-noser from Nova Scotia and had apparently spent most of his life in boats.  Always quiet, always polite, always sober and a truly great contrast with the usual rowdy waterfront types so common on the coast.  In all the years that I knew Emory I never heard him swear or raise his voice.

While he was still working on the Eucluetaw, a terrible accident occurred.  Somehow or other Emory got his leg in the bight of a tow line and when the slack was taken up the cable essentially cut his leg off above the knee.  He recuperated in the hospital at Ocean Falls but, of course, was never able to go back to his old job.

On the water front at Ocean Falls there was a large boat house with marine ways where a fairly large boat like a salmon troller or even a seiner could be brought up out of the water in a cradle for repairs.  This establishment was run by a big, bluff character by the name of Murray Balmer.  Murray was a long time friend of Emory Lewis and after the accident a small room was fitted up under the rafters at one end of the big boat house and Emory moved in there.  It was for all the world like a ship's cabin with a bunk on one wall and a view out over the harbour from the one window and in typical Emory Lewis fashion, it was always as ship shape and neat as a pin.

It was after Emory came ashore and settled into his cubby hole at the Marine works that I came to know him best.  At that time I suppose Emory was in his late 50's or early 60's and I was about 16 years old.  I don't really know how it was that we became so friendly.  None of the other boys of my age seemed to be particularly interested in the old sailor and he wasn't a very outgoing or gregarious type.  But I did admire him and was always interested in what he was doing and I suppose that he sensed this.

One day he said, "If you go to the store and get some 5/8" manila rope I will show you how to splice."  Short splices, long splices, eye splices, rope-end knots and even a four-stranded Turk's Head - Emory taught me all of them.  I can still hear him saying, "Roll the rope towards you and tuck away from you."  They say that there are tricks in all trades and I remember him telling me to take part of the natural twist out of a rope before making an eye splice so that the eye would remain nice and flat.  To open up the strands in a rope for splicing one uses a sort of a big wooden marlin spike which is called a FID.  Emory gave me a nice piece of yew wood and showed me how to make a fid.  I still have it.

Emory built the most beautiful model of the schooner, "Blue Nose".  It was about three feet long and sailed gloriously when he took it out in the harbour.  He was also able to rig the hull as a sloop by taking out the schooner masts, plugging these deck holes and installing a single mast about six feet long.  His friend, Murray Balmer, also built a similar-sized model sloop (with considerable help from Emory, I suspect) and one year the two of them took their model yachts to Vancouver to enter into competition.  In those days, of course, there was no such thing as radio-controlled models and it required great skill to build and sail boats that would hold a true course over the three legs of the triangular competition course.  Every time a competitor had to touch his boat to reset the course or to change the set of the sails, he was penalized.  Well, to cut my story short, Murray won in Vancouver and after that the other B.C. competitors had to come to Ocean Falls to challenge.  Emory built himself a special small, light weight, clinker built row boat which he used to keep up with these model boats.

He also built a twelve foot clinker built row boat for me - truly a thing of beauty with a little half seat at the bow, two rowing seats, and a stern seat.  With two pairs of spoon oars, my cousin and I could really make that boat fly!  For short distances we could even go as fast as some of the gas boats and that used to give us great pleasure.  We would quite commonly row out as far as five miles from town and back again.  Later on I acquired a 3.7 horsepower outboard motor and made many trips of up to 20 or 30 miles in this most excellent little craft.

But to return to Emory Lewis.  He decided that he would build himself a boat on which he could live.  With his background it had to be a sail boat and he decided that a thirty-seven foot ketch would suit him nicely and that he would be able to handle it single handedly.  It has been said of the famous old clipper ships, like the Cutty Sark, that the hulls were such beautiful sweeping curves that at no place could a yardstick be placed flat on the hull.  And this was certainly the tradition that Emory followed in designing his dream boat.  Plans on paper are one thing but in order to visualize the final shape and lines of the hull there is nothing to beat a half model and that is the way Emory started.  I don't know what the scale was but I would guess it was about one inch to the foot and so he took a block of wood roughly three feet long and half as wide as the beam of the boat and carved this out until he had exactly the hull shape that he wanted.  It would be hard to over-estimate the skill, the tradition and the knowledge that went into this model.  By using calipers on the half model, the actual dimensions of the boat were determined.

Emory had many friends that worked on the tow boats or in the logging camps on the coast and to this fraternity he sent out his specifications for a log of yellow cedar that would have just the right curve for the stem of the boat.  The natural curve would, of course, be much stronger than a curve produced by artificial bending or sawing.

Several logs were brought in to Emory and he finally found one that suited him.  In my mind's eye, I can still see him straddling that log with his one good leg and one wooden peg and carving out the stem of his dream boat with a lipped adze as sharp as a razor.  The finished stem looked as if it had been hand planed.

One day, one of his adzes was stolen and I was full of ideas of how he should get the police involved and other ways of trying to catch the thief.  But in his serious, slow way, Emory said that he didn't want to do that.  He said, "I don't think I want to know who took the adze.  You see, it might be someone that I have rather liked."

Keel and keelson, stern and stem and planking - all clear, fine-grained yellow cedar.  Ribs all of heavy oak steamed and bent to match the little model and the picture in Emory's mind.  The whole thing was fitted and finished like a piece of fine furniture.  When the bare hull was finished the boat was taken out of the shop and put in the water.  Emory invited me to come aboard and took me down beside the keelson to show me some little bits of bone dry sawdust left over from the work - his proof that every joint was tight and perfect.

There was, of course, a great deal of work still to be done in building the cabin, finishing the inside of the boat and rigging it.  I did see one other item, the steering wheel made of yew wood and brass - a true work of art.

About this time I left Ocean Falls to go to university and so lost touch with the further work on the boat.  But I know that Emory never lived to finish the job.  I don't know whether this is a sad ending to my story but I really don't think so.  Building that boat was the best possible climax to the life of one of the finest and gentlest men it has ever been my privilege to know.

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A FEW MEMORABLE EVENTS

 2200 VOLTS

One day when both my younger brother Ellis and I were still in elementary school we were both running around outside during the afternoon recess.  In an area of rough land beside the school there was a huge old tree stump which had been left over from earlier logging days.  It had been partially dug out all around so that the stump sat at the bottom of a sort of bowl.

Ellis ran down beside the stump and hit a disused radio aerial wire that had fallen down from a nearby house.  In falling, the wire had dropped across a live 2200 volt power line and had gradually abraded it until good electrical conduct between the two wires had occurred.

The wire simply picked Ellis up and threw him to the ground and was shaking him like a fish on the end of a line.  I rushed over to help him but immediately got a terrible shock myself and so had to back off.  By the grace of God two young men carrying tennis racquets and wearing rubber soled shoes just happened to be passing by.  They rushed over and by using the racquets were able to scoop Ellis off the wire.  The school principal, William Plenderleith, arrived on the scene at that moment.  He picked Ellis up, put him over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes and ran with him into the school and up to the teacher’s lounge on the second floor.  I ran with them.  By a second miracle Mr. Penderleith had learned artificial respiration just a few days before.  He put Ellis on a couch in the lounge and started the business of using two hands to compress the lungs and then release pressure in such a way as to initiate breathing.  Ellis at that time had no pulse and was not breathing.  I sat in the lounge and watched as the principal continued his efforts until he broke out into a sweat and the hair fell over his eyes.  In the meantime, the doctor had arrived but could do nothing except encourage Mr. Penderleith to continue his efforts.  After what seemed an eternity Ellis began to gasp and breathe on his own.  The ambulance arrived and Ellis was taken to the hospital.  His life was then out of danger but he had a most terrible long burn diagonally across one collar bone where the wire had lain and many smaller burns on his legs where the current had gone to ground.  The big burn was exceptionally painful and slow to heal.

This nearly fatal electrical shock also seemed to have had a long lasting effect on Ellis’ nervous system.  For many months he was as jumpy as could be, like a person on the edge of a nervous breakdown.

KILLER WHALES

        The map shows that the south end of Link Lake at Ocean Falls comes within a very short distance of Dean Channel at a point which would be about twelve miles away from Ocean Falls by boat.  We knew this and thought it would make an interesting expedition to hike from the lake down to the sea.

My two brothers and I and my cousin Donald Patterson who was staying with us at the time got a row boat and with it got to the south end of the lake.  There was no trail and I doubt if anyone had bothered to go over this neck of land before but it was not too rough and by following a small stream we were able to make our way through the bush until we came out on top of a small bluff in a bay on Dean Channel.

Here we were treated to a very rare sight.  In the bay right at our feet and within a stone’s throw was a family of about six killer whales.  One can only suppose that they were simply playing and enjoying themselves as they splashed and rolled and snorted and sometimes leaped almost right out of the sea.  We sat on the rock and enjoyed this amazing spectacle for a long time.  Our height on the bluff and our nearness to this pod of magnificent animals gave us a never-to-be-forgotten show.

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YANKEE DRYER

Paper machines complete the drying of the paper by passing the moving web over and around steam filled cylinders which, quite naturally, are called dryers.  Four of the machines at Ocean Falls each had banks of these dryers about four feet in diameter.  The number 5 paper machine was designed to make different types and lighter weights of paper and it had a single drying cylinder about twelve feet in diameter.  This was called a Yankee dryer.  It was made of cast iron.

There was a tiny little beach near the end of the inlet on the town side and directly across the water from one end of the mill.  I was there one sunny summer afternoon when suddenly there was a tremendous explosion and we knew immediately that the noise had come from the mill and that something was terribly wrong.  We ran along a long trestle which went from the beach area down to the bridge which joined the mill and the town.  The bridge was the only way out of the mill.

The explosion had been plainly heard all over the town and by the time we reached the bridge people were streaming down there to see what had happened.  We have all seen pictures of mine disasters where the miners’ wives were congregated at the mine entrance as the dead and injured were carried out.  The scene at the Ocean Falls bridge that day was identical - everyone trying to find out exactly what had caused the huge explosion and hoping that the son or brother or husband had not been hurt.

The big Yankee dryer had exploded with great chunks of cast iron shot out in every direction.  One man was killed outright, mostly by the escape of the high pressure scalding steam.  Another man had a piece blown out of his skull.  Many others suffered lesser injuries.  Stretchers were being carried out and rushed to the hospital for some time.  It speaks well of the skill of the local doctor that the man whose head was so badly injured survived and eventually returned to work with a silver plate where part of his head used to be.

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PENSTOCK

This is the story of another industrial accident but luckily in this case no one was injured.  Two huge pipes called penstocks, each about twelve feet in diameter, were set in one end of the big concrete dam and came down a very steep hillside to the mill.  One of the penstocks led into the power house to supply the high pressure water needed to turn the Pelton wheels which drove the electrical generators.  The other penstock went into the mill to satisfy the very great thirst of the pulp and paper making processes.

It was possible to shut off the flow in either penstock by closing big valves set into the pipes where they left the dam and one winter it was decided to shut off the mill penstock in order to do some necessary repair work.  Each penstock had a tall air vent at the dam to allow air to enter as the water ran out.

On the appointed day the big valve on the mill penstock was slowly closed by a motor driven mechanism.  Unfortunately the air vent had water in it (quite naturally) and the water had frozen to make a solid air-tight plug.  The valve closed, the water rushed down the pipe, an almost perfect vacuum developed and the whole penstock collapsed with a great bang into a tangled mass of steel on the hillside.

From the company point of view this was a catastrophe of the first order.  The water supply was absolutely critical to the mill operation.  Wireless messages went out within the hour to Crown Zellerbach’s head office in San Francisco.  Most urgent orders were immediately placed with suppliers and rolling mills in the United States began 24 hour per day preparation of the huge curved steel plates needed to replace the penstock.  Delivery was by chartered freighter and special crews came in to rivet the plates together.  The reconstruction was also a 24 hour per day operation and I remember how colourful it was at night.  The rivets had to be red hot when they were formed in place.  They were heated on the ground and then thrown up to be caught in a bucket by the riveter’s helper.  It was just like fireworks to watch the arcs of the red hot rivets on a dark winter’s night.

SHIVAREES

It would seem that shivarees are either extinct or, at best, an endangered species and so perhaps they rate a few words.  Back in the days of which I speak they were quite common.

When a couple were married in Ocean Falls and had a wedding reception the word would get out to the young boys and girls of the town.  In many cases I think that the adult friends of the bride or groom were responsible for seeing that the young fry were apprised of the reception.

We would then get a stick and the metal lid of a garbage can or a big pot or any other way of making the loudest possible noise and proceed in a gang to the reception.  We would stand outside and set up the most ferocious din.  This is called a shivaree.  Custom demands that the groom or the best man receive all this hullabaloo in a good natured fashion as an essential part of the whole wedding celebration.  They put up with it for a short while and then one comes out and either throws money to the crowd or finds a ringleader and gives him money to be fairly distributed among the noise makers.  This always buys them off and they disperse peacefully.

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Epilogue

It was a strange and a wonderful town, a world unto itself because of its extreme isolation, a very closely knit community and truly home to a wide diversity of peoples.  To live in Vancouver was to know three or four neighbours and a few other friends and relatives.  To live in Ocean Falls was to know hundreds of people.  I can recall returning to Ocean Falls at Christmas when I was in university in Vancouver.  It was coming home and not only in the sense of just rejoining my immediate family but in the broader feeling of the community.  When I walked on the streets doors would open and friends would pop out to invite me in for a drink or a coffee.  A walk through the mill was a slow process with so many of the men coming to shake hands and ask how I was doing.

I wish I could revisit that town again.  After all these years I suppose there would be no one that I would know but I feel that the atmosphere and the warmth would still be there.

Unfortunately the town that I knew is gone; the mill is dead and gutted and largely torn down and almost all of the town burned to the ground.  Only a very small handful of people still linger in this area where once there were about 2000.

The fatal illness which killed Ocean Falls became increasingly apparent in the 1960s.  For a number of reasons the once profitable mill was beginning to operate in the red.  The availability and the cost of wood, the every-increasing cost of labour, the inefficiencies of out-dated mill equipment, the very diversity of which the mill was once so proud; all these were contributing factors.  Crown Zellerbach made many studies in an effort to keep the mill and the town alive but by 1972 Bob Rogers, the then president of Crown Zellerbach Canada, was forced to announce that Ocean Falls was losing a million dollars a month and that the company had no alternative but to close down.

Closure was scheduled for early 1973.  At the last minute the B.C. government agreed to buy Crown Zellerbach out for one million dollars and to try to keep the mill going but this was largely a political gesture.  The government certainly had much less expertise in the pulp and paper business than Crown Zellerbach and there was no real reason to think that they could effect a cure.  With a half dead mill and a dying town the new owners ran only the two newsprint paper machines for several years but the hand writing was clearly on the wall.

The final crash came in 1980.  I have seen an amateur video of what happened in that year and I don’t want to see it again.  A great auction was held to sell off mill equipment.  Mill buildings were dynamited to piles of rubble.  Steel beams and old machinery were cut up for scrap metal and towed away on barges.  But the most heart rending part of the video was to watch the burning down of the townsite houses, to see great flames licking out the doors and windows, to watch a roof falling in, to hear the crackling of the burning wood and to say, “That was my friend Eric Stenstrom’s house”.

By this time you are surely convinced that I am more than a little nutty on the subject of Ocean Falls.  I plead guilty but would like to tell you that this particular form of insanity is shared with many of the Ocean Falls old-timers.  Starting in the early 1970’s Ocean Falls Reunions have been organized and held in various places in the province - in the Vancouver area, in Kamloops, Duncan, Elk Falls.  These have continued each year or every other year.  The last one was held in 1996 and 791 people attended!

This year I hope to revisit Ocean Falls and spend four or five days there.  I know that I will find only a thick growth of alder trees where the rows of white houses once stood but perhaps if I stand very still near the townsite wharf at midday I will hear (in memory) the sound of the twelve o’clock mill whistle echoing off the slopes of the unchanging mountains.

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